Hough High grad beat the odds to reach the Olympics. Now she needs to beat them again
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2020 Summer Olympics: North Carolina athletes
Here’s a look at The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer’s coverage of athletes with ties to North Carolina competing at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021.
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In the mid-2010s, Erika Brown moved to the Charlotte area and was a fine high school freestyle swimmer at Hough High in Cornelius. She won a couple of N.C. state titles and was a D-1 college recruit, eventually ending up at the University of Tennessee.
Still, not much about Brown screamed out that she was a future Olympian. In fact, after her freshman year at Tennessee, she said she seriously considered giving up the sport. She was a homebody who missed her family and who had bigger goals than swimming: She wanted to be a mother, as well as a licensed real-estate agent.
Brown still wants to do both those things. But they are on hold for a while, because she stayed with swimming and now she’s in Tokyo, representing Team USA — and Hough — in these Summer Olympics. She will compete in two Olympic events in Japan beginning Saturday with the 4x100 women’s freestyle relay, followed by the 100 freestyle heats starting Wednesday.
“I’m just really honored,” said Brown, whose senior year at Tennessee was abruptly cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “This is the highest achievement in the sport. I’m getting to compete for a team again — and not just any team, but Team USA. And we win gold medals. That’s the goal, and that’s my mindset.”
Like Cary teenager Claire Curzan, Brown is one of the surprises on this U.S. Olympic swim team. Although she was a standout swimmer at Tennessee and a two-time SEC female swimmer of the year, she wasn’t a favorite to make the squad at the Olympic Trials in Omaha in June. She barely qualified for the 100-meter freestyle final, which is her strongest event, finishing eighth in the semis.
Brown went into that 8-woman final in an outside lane, hoping for a top-4 finish to guarantee herself an Olympic relay spot.
“I think the Olympic Trials were a little bit overwhelming for me,” Brown said in our phone interview before she left for Tokyo. “Over the past year, I hadn’t been able to race as much as I wanted to. ... I was just a little nervous going into the prelims and semis for the 100 free. But I had a great talk with my coach, and my mom and fiance were there with me, so it was nice to have them supporting me before that final and kind of reminding me of all the work I’ve done. My faith is really important to me, too, and so I found some peace in prayer. ... My ultimate goal was top-4, but when I got to the wall and saw I had actually made it in an individual event, too (by finishing second with a time of 53.59 seconds, to Abbey Weitzeil’s 53.53), I was so excited. I just felt really grateful and blessed.”
Brown spent two years in the Charlotte area, moving for athletic purposes to join the SwimMAC powerhouse. She was a solid national-level age-group swimmer while competing for SwimMAC, but wasn’t ranked among the top 20 female recruits in the country in her Class of 2016. As the swimming website SwimSwam wrote recently when surveying her pre-Olympic career: “Brown is a great example of a true college breakout swimmer.”
“I kind of grew up all over the country — mostly in California, but I moved to Kansas for a couple of years,” Brown said. “Then my Dad got a job in Maryland and we wanted to find a place for me to swim and my two younger sisters, who also swam at the time… We thought Charlotte was the perfect location and SwimMAC was a great team.... So I lived with my two younger sisters and my mom in a house in Charlotte and then my dad had a house in Maryland, and we visited back and forth.”
Brown, 22, lived in Cornelius and went to Hough as a junior and senior in high school (overlapping with future UNC basketball star Luke Maye) before moving to Tennessee for college. She still lives in Tennessee now, as does the rest of her family. She has graduated from college and has already begun to study real estate, which she plans to pursue as a career in some way whenever swimming ends. She and her fiance, Alec Connolly, plan to marry in June 2022.
Mostly, though, Brown said, she wants to be a mother.
“I just have a dream of being a mom,” Brown said. “My mom (Christine Brown) was a stay-at-home mom when I was younger. ... I would love to be able to spend some time at home with my kids, so that’s kind of my big dream.”
Before all that comes the Olympics, which started Wednesday. Brown would seem to have a better medal chance in the 4x100 team relay this weekend than in her individual event, where swimmers from Australia and Sweden are favored. Then again, she’s beaten the odds before.
This story was originally published July 22, 2021 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Hough High grad beat the odds to reach the Olympics. Now she needs to beat them again."
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